Milbank: Congress too busy focusing on carp to fix budget mess

WASHINGTON — To say our lawmakers are carping at trifles gives them too much credit. In fact, they are carping at carp.

“Asian carp (are) one of the world’s most rampant invasive species,” Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, proclaimed on the House floor, 35 hours into the debate over budget cuts. “Weighing up to 100 pounds, spanning over six feet and eating half their body weight daily, Asian carp have the ability to decimate fish populations indigenous to the Great Lakes.”

That certainly stinks for Great Lakes fish, and Great Lakes fishermen. But if you think the federal budget will be balanced on the backs of the Asian carp, you’re all wet. And that’s what makes Camp’s carping emblematic of the current debate over budget cuts. The whole exercise is less about improving the nation’s fiscal balance than parochial concerns and political volleys.

Camp continued: “These giant bottom feeders” — he was talking about the fish, not his colleagues — “would destroy the region’s $7.5 billion fishing industry.” His solution: Have the feds close the locks that separate the Illinois River from Lake Michigan.

Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., rose in opposition. “No one wants carps in the Great Lakes,” but “the closure of the locks is uncalled for.”

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., provided a bulletin on the enemy’s position: “The Asian carp are 42 miles from the city of Chicago.” Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., offered a procedural solution to the invasion. Instead of beginning his speech with the customary parliamentary language, “I rise to strike the requisite number of words,” he said: “I rise to strike the requisite number of fish.”

The amendment went belly-up.

House Speaker John Boehner deserves credit for allowing a free-wheeling budget debate. But the rare spectacle also revealed how petty this whole budget-cutting exercise is. The nation’s debt problem is enormous — but so far President Obama and the lawmakers have tiptoed around the real problems, particularly Medicare.

Instead, they’re haggling over the 36 percent of the budget called “discretionary spending,” and particularly the 13 percent known as “non-defense discretionary spending.” Even in the unlikely event House Republicans can force Obama and Senate Democrats to go along with their $60 billion of cuts in the current fiscal year, that would barely dent this year’s $1.5 trillion deficit, even as it causes chaos and throws hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

As such, the budget debate had less to do with cutting deficits than with making points: de-funding Planned Parenthood, dismantling federal education funding, abolishing foreign aid and blocking implementation of health-care reform, financial regulations and environmental rules.

With Medicare and the other drivers of the debt crisis out of consideration, the task amounted to sweating the small stuff.

Democrats retaliated with their own frivolity. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota proposed taking the oom-pah out of military bands by restricting spending for the Pentagon’s music. She managed to force a floor debate on whether to block the Pentagon from sponsoring NASCAR drivers.